The quick answer: Google Local Services Ads cover more than 200 service categories in the United States, grouped into home services, auto, beauty, wellness, pet care, education, moving and storage, and the licensed professional verticals such as legal, health care, financial planning and real estate. Eligibility is decided by your category, your location, and whether you pass the verification that category requires. Two things changed recently that most articles on this subject have not caught up with: the Google Guaranteed badge no longer exists, and Local Services Ads are being migrated into Performance Max campaigns with pay per lead goals, starting August 2026.
If you are checking whether your industry qualifies, the category list below answers that. If you already run Local Services Ads, the second half matters more, because the way you manage and pay for them is changing this year.
The Eligible Categories
Google organizes Local Services Ads into vertical groups. The table gives the groups and a representative sample of what sits inside each one. It is a sample rather than the complete list, because the complete list runs past 200 entries and Google revises it.
| Vertical group | Examples of what is included |
|---|---|
| Home services | Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, siding, flooring, carpentry, remodeling, countertops, fencing, landscaping, lawn care, tree service, pest control, house cleaning, junk removal, appliance repair, garage door, locksmith, window services, water damage restoration, pool service, solar, snow removal, home inspection, home security, home theater |
| Auto services | Repair shops, transmission, brakes, air conditioning, body shops, glass repair, detailing, car wash, inspections, oil change, batteries, window tinting |
| Beauty | Barber shops, hair salons, extensions, braiding, nail salons, hair removal, facials, spray tanning, lash and brow services, makeup |
| Wellness | Personal training, massage, yoga, weight loss, first aid instruction |
| Pet care | Grooming, boarding, training, adoption, shelters |
| Education | Tutoring, driving instruction, language instruction, dance, preschools, beauty and massage schools |
| Moving and storage | Movers |
| Legal | Personal injury, family, criminal, DUI, immigration, bankruptcy, estate, business, contract, labor, litigation, malpractice, intellectual property, real estate, traffic, disability |
| Health care | Dentist, chiropractor, dermatologist, optometrist, ophthalmologist, physical therapist, podiatrist, primary care physician, orthopedic surgeon, plastic surgeon, acupuncturist, allergist, audiologist, dietitian, veterinarian |
| Other professional | Financial planning, tax services, real estate services |
Two qualifications matter more than the list itself.
Availability is local, not national. A category being eligible in the United States does not mean it is live in your metro. Google opens categories market by market, and the only reliable check is your own address inside the sign up flow. Two businesses in the same trade, ninety miles apart, can get different answers.
The category you pick decides what you are charged for. Local Services Ads bill per lead rather than per click, and each category has its own lead definition and its own market rate. Picking the closest available category rather than the accurate one is a common and expensive mistake, because it puts you in an auction against businesses whose leads are worth something different from yours.
What Verification Your Category Requires
Every advertiser goes through screening, but the depth varies, and it is the part that decides how long you wait before ads run.
Business level checks, required of everyone
Business registration, a business owner background check, and proof of general liability insurance. This is the floor for every vertical.
Licence verification, required of the licensed trades
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC contractors, roofers and the rest of the licensed trades submit their state or local licence, and Google checks it against the issuing authority. A licence that is expired, held under a different entity name, or issued to a person rather than the business is the most common reason an application stalls. Sort the paperwork before you apply rather than during.
Professional credential checks, required of the licensed professions
Lawyers, doctors, dentists, financial planners and real estate professionals are verified against their bar, board or regulator, and individual practitioner checks may apply as well as the business ones. These take the longest.
Two practical notes that are easy to miss. Booking leads are not available for health care verticals, so a medical practice gets calls and messages rather than direct appointment booking. And pre badge ads are not available for garage door services, health care verticals or locksmiths, which means those categories cannot run at all until verification completes. In most other categories you can run in a limited way while the check is pending.
The Google Guaranteed Badge No Longer Exists
This is the first thing most articles on this topic get wrong, because they were written before it changed.
On 20 October 2025, Google retired three separate badges and replaced them with one. The green Google Guaranteed badge, the Google Screened badge used by professional services, and License Verified by Google all became a single blue Google Verified badge. Google’s stated reason was that the multiple badges confused consumers in its own focus groups and online testing.
Existing advertisers kept their status automatically. No reapplication, no interruption.
The substantive change was not the colour. The money back guarantee was discontinued. The old Google Guaranteed badge carried a Google backed reimbursement, capped at the job amount, for customers unhappy with work booked through the ad. That protection is gone. The final reimbursement window covered services booked before 7 December 2025.
If your marketing materials, your website or your sales script still say “Google Guaranteed” or reference a Google backed money back guarantee, that is now inaccurate and worth correcting. It is also worth knowing that the badge is currently unavailable for the auto, beauty and dining verticals, so businesses in those categories run Local Services Ads without one.
Local Services Ads Are Moving Into Performance Max
This is the bigger change, it is already underway, and it is almost entirely absent from the articles ranking for this topic.
Google is migrating Local Services Ads into Performance Max campaigns with pay per lead goals. The product is not being discontinued. It is being moved out of its own separate dashboard and into Google Ads proper, while keeping the pay per lead billing model that makes it distinctive.
| Phase | When | Who moves |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | August 2026 | Selected United States home and storefront service providers: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, moving |
| Phase 2 | Late 2026 | Service area businesses without a storefront, and accounts using custom bidding or booking configurations |
| Phase 3 | 2027 | Accounts outside the United States, and the remaining categories including advanced verification trades such as locksmiths and garage door professionals |
What stays the same
You still pay per lead rather than per click. Ads still appear only on Google Search and Google Maps. Targeting is still keywordless, driven by your service categories and your service area rather than by a keyword list. Your lead history and message history transfer across automatically. Your verification status transfers too, and you are not asked to reverify insurance or licences.
What changes, and what it will cost you if you ignore it
Your historical performance reports do not carry over. This is the one with a deadline attached. Export your Local Services reporting before your account migrates, because afterwards it is gone. Google surfaces the export on the redirection page at migration time, which is easy to click past.
Weekly budgets become daily averages. The system divides your existing weekly budget by seven. The total is comparable, but if you deliberately front loaded spend into particular days, that intent does not survive the conversion.
Manual bidding and industry level target CPA are deprecated. They are replaced by a single campaign level target CPA. If you currently bid differently by category, because a drain cleaning lead and a full system replacement lead are worth very different amounts to you, that distinction disappears inside one campaign. The fix is to split those categories into separate campaigns, and it is better done deliberately before the migration than discovered afterwards when the blended target quietly overpays for cheap leads and underbids on expensive ones.
Management moves to Google Ads. If your Local Services account was run separately from your Google Ads account, possibly by a different person, those worlds merge. Check who has access to what before the merge rather than after.
One smaller item for completeness: on 31 July 2026 the Local Services platform policies were renamed Local Services Ads requirements, with terminology tidied and obsolete rules removed. It is housekeeping rather than a change in what is allowed, but it means older links and older quotes now point at renamed documents.
What Local Services Leads Actually Cost
There is no flat rate, and any article quoting one should be treated with suspicion. Cost per lead is set by an auction inside your category and your market, so a personal injury lead and a lawn care lead are not in the same universe, and the same trade in Knoxville and in Chicago will not price the same.
What is worth understanding is the mechanics rather than a number.
You are charged for leads, not clicks, which sounds like it removes waste and does not entirely. A lead is a call, a message or a booking. It is not a customer. Calls that were wrong numbers, outside your service area, or for work you do not do can be disputed for credit, and disputing them properly is the single highest return administrative habit in the channel. Businesses that never dispute pay for a meaningful volume of rubbish. Businesses that dispute everything get their credit rate scrutinised. Dispute the genuinely invalid ones, promptly, with a reason.
Your budget sets exposure rather than purchase. You are telling Google how much you are willing to spend, not buying a set number of leads, and in a thin category you may not spend it.
Because the money is now flowing through a target CPA rather than a manual bid, the accuracy of what you tell Google a lead is worth matters much more than it used to. That number should come from your own closing data. If you have not worked it out, our PPC Budget Calculator runs the arithmetic backwards from the revenue you need, and setting your budget backwards from revenue covers the method in full.
If Your Category Is Not Eligible
Plenty of legitimate businesses are not on the list: business to business services, most retail, manufacturing, hospitality, trades that Google has not opened in your market yet. The answer is not to force a nearby category, which misrepresents what you do and puts you in the wrong auction.
The answer is that Local Services Ads were never the whole of local paid search. Standard Google Ads reach the same searches, cover every category, and give you keyword level control that Local Services Ads deliberately do not. The trade is that you pay per click rather than per lead and you are responsible for the landing page and the conversion. We compared the two directly in Local Service Ads versus Google Ads for home service businesses, and the honest summary is that most home service companies eventually run both rather than choosing.
Before either, make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and your review flow is running, because the organic local pack sits above both and costs nothing per lead. Getting more Google reviews covers that, and reviews feed Local Services ranking as well.
How Ranking Actually Works Once You Are In
Eligibility gets you into the auction. It does not get you to the top of it. Four things move position, and only one of them is money.
- Review score and volume. The most visible differentiator in the unit, and the one competitors can see. Reviews earned through Local Services Ads count, and so do your Google Business Profile reviews.
- Responsiveness. Missed calls and slow replies are scored against you. In a channel billed per lead, a lead you do not answer is money spent for nothing, twice over.
- Proximity and service area. Drawing a service area far wider than you will realistically travel dilutes relevance and buys leads you then decline.
- Budget and bid. Real, and last, which is the opposite of how most advertisers rank these factors.
The response time point is worth sitting with. Businesses that answer within the first minutes consistently outperform businesses with better reviews and larger budgets who do not, and after hours volume is where most of that is lost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my industry eligible for Google Local Services Ads?
If you are a local service business in home services, auto, beauty, wellness, pet care, education, moving, or a licensed profession such as law, medicine, dentistry, financial planning or real estate, your category is probably on the list of more than 200 eligible categories in the United States. Whether it is live in your specific market is a separate question, and the only reliable way to answer it is to enter your business address in the Local Services sign up flow, because Google opens categories market by market rather than nationally.
What happened to the Google Guaranteed badge?
It was retired on 20 October 2025 and replaced, together with Google Screened and License Verified by Google, by a single blue Google Verified badge. Existing advertisers were transitioned automatically with no action required. The important part is that the money back guarantee that came with the old badge was discontinued, with the last reimbursement window covering services booked before 7 December 2025. Marketing materials that still promise a Google backed guarantee are now inaccurate.
Are Local Services Ads going away?
No. They are being moved into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay per lead goals, starting with selected United States home and storefront providers in August 2026, expanding to service area businesses in late 2026, and reaching non United States accounts and the remaining categories in 2027. Pay per lead billing, Search and Maps placement, and keywordless category targeting all continue. What changes is where you manage it and how you bid.
What do I need to do before my account migrates to Performance Max?
Export your historical Local Services performance reports, because they do not carry over and are not recoverable afterwards. Check your budget, since weekly budgets are converted to daily averages by dividing by seven. If you bid differently by service category today, plan to split those categories into separate campaigns, because industry level target CPA is being replaced by a single campaign level target. Confirm who has access to the Google Ads account the Local Services account is merging into.
Do I have to reverify my licence and insurance when I migrate?
No. Verification status transfers automatically and Google does not ask for insurance or licence reverification as part of the migration. Your badge and screening carry across.
How much do Local Services Ads cost per lead?
There is no fixed rate. Price is set by auction within your category and your market, so a legal lead and a lawn care lead are nowhere near each other, and identical businesses in different cities pay differently. What you control is the target cost per acquisition you set, which should come from your own close rate and job value rather than from a published average, and how diligently you dispute invalid leads for credit.
Can I run Local Services Ads and regular Google Ads at the same time?
Yes, and most established home service advertisers do. They occupy different positions on the results page and behave differently: Local Services Ads bill per lead with no landing page involved, while standard search ads bill per click and give you keyword level control and a page you own. Running both is normal rather than redundant, provided you measure them separately.
Where to Start
Check eligibility with your real address rather than your metro name, because the answer is local. Get your licence and insurance paperwork current before you apply, since that is what stalls most applications. Then decide what a lead is genuinely worth to you before you set a target, because under the new bidding model that number does more work than it used to.
If you would rather have the account built and managed by people who do this daily, that is our PPC management practice, and our home services marketing work covers the trades where Local Services Ads matter most. If you want to understand the paid search side more broadly first, the complete Google Ads playbook for home services is the longer read, and what Google Ads actually cost for HVAC and home service businesses covers the economics.
Facts in this article come from Google’s own documentation: the Google Verified badge announcement, the Performance Max transition notice and the supported verticals list. Google revises all three, so check them against the date at the top of this page before acting on anything time sensitive.